‘I don’t believe in God, and I think he can tell.’
Having just walked out of a church choir recital, it’s Steve Coogan as Martin Sixsmith, a disgraced journalist/spin doctor, who gets the best lines in Stephen Frears’s scathing observance of how loveless religion – in this case Catholicism – can devastate lives.
That Sixsmith is the more conflicted, complex character in a two-hander with Judi Dench’s Philomena should not surprise, given that the movie is based on his book and the script co-written by Coogan himself.
What delights is the chemistry – the warmth and concord – that exists between two performers who ordinarily approach a role from opposite ends of the emotional colour spectrum.
Philomena, in her old age, wants to know what happened to the illegitimate son who was taken from her by the ‘sisters of little mercy’ and adopted out to an American couple fifty years ago. Sixsmith, needing a newspaper gig, agrees to help her find out, with the intention of publishing it as a ‘human interest’ story.
The flashback sequences at the Irish convent where Philomena and her child lived are harrowing, but what might so easily have tilted disastrously into self- defeating mawkishness is kept on an even keel by gentle, episodic road-trip humour as Sixsmith’s investigations result in the pair traveling together to the US.
There is as well a mystery that is being solved, step-by-step, meaning that there is no time to wallow in bathos. But by far the most compelling element is the way in which Philomena’s tested but unwavering commitment to her faith works on Sixsmith as he grows evermore judgmental of those who wronged her.
An outstanding film that hammers both the church and the Fourth Estate with an iron fist in a velvet glove, ends with Sixsmith, back in Ireland with Philomena, quoting TS Eliot: ‘We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time’.
Too true.
~ John Campbell
